


At My Door You Are Welcome In

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: Depression, Domesticity, Intimacy, M/M, Plants, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Slice of Life, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 17:30:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13792614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: "How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever comes to that," said Frodo."Ah!" said Sam. "And where will they live? That's what I often wonder."A story about surviving and living, about living not together but with each other, and-what, you thought this was going to be different?--about love.





	At My Door You Are Welcome In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts), [orchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchis/gifts).



> This is a weird thing. I wrote it thinking of Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietila and their next-door studios, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and their next-door houses, and everyone I love who lives in painful times and has painful days, and all the ways of being there for someone, wherever _there_ is.
> 
> For Gloss and Orchis--who else? With a title like this it should be pornier, I realize. I'll do better next time.

The light is failing—not the Light, but the ordinary daily light from Ndav's second sun, which at this time of year sets a little later than the first. Poe has trained most of the Ndav ivy away from his window, mostly so that the moss and ferns and other moisture-loving plants he keeps in hanging baskets can get their share of sunlight, but a few strands linger to sweeten the air in the room, their shadows swaying in the deep-orange square of light on the back wall.

He got back an hour ago, took off his boots, rolled a joint to set aside for later and cleared some surfaces, including his work surface; tinkered a little, but didn't make any real progress. It's time to let the day be over. There are no emergencies and he's done what he can.

Poe Dameron, former best pilot in the Resistance, daredevil and poster boy for rebellion, also spy (“It was a double bluff!” he remembers protesting to Finn when he asked how, exactly, that was supposed to work out), king of air and void, is now designing, repairing and modifying ships and in-atmo craft instead of flying them. The Light, thanks to thousands of Force-sensitives across the galaxy in general and Rey in particular, is in fairly good shape, a healthy balance to the Darkness. So it's okay that he doesn't really believe the war is over, and he still tenses at certain kinds of shadows and certain tones of voice, gets weepy or angry out of proportion to whatever just happened. Forgets to eat sometimes, or eats like he'll never see food again and then feels sick.

In fact, he hasn't eaten since the morning. He doesn't think he can face a ration bar, but he's got yogurt fermenting near the central heat conduit and some dried fruit. He manages to get that down and swills his mouth out with water from the dewcatcher pipe, clean if a little flat, and that reminds him to put water on to heat. And that's when he hears the knocking, two close together like a stutter and then one firm, familiar and yet echoing through him.

Poe doesn't bother checking the peephole, because there's only one person who knocks like that, and he's standing there when Poe opens the door. Finn looks tired, but his smile is warm and their kiss is sweet and he says, “Hey,” in his deep voice like he's the one offering welcome. “You wanna put a light on in here?” Dusk has settled while they were greeting each other, and Poe lights a warm light that sends the shadows into the corners.

Finn sits down on the chair that Poe cleared of shirts and socks and diagrams and the plug they keep meaning to try and keep not bothering to reach for at the critical moment. The water is hot enough now on the little sunpowered electric element, and Poe pours it into the galvanized tub and adds a pinch of last season's moss while Finn takes off his boots.

Their rhythm and their pace have evolved over many evenings, quietly, without speaking: by the time Finn's feet are bare and stinking, the moss is fragrant in the water. Finn grunts as the heat first meets his skin, then sighs as everything in him adjusts, loosens, accommodates to the shape of the chair and the evening and the company.

Outside the window, the dark reaction begins, letting the Ndav ivy exhale the oxygen that hovers around the building like a nurturing blanket. Its roots flourish in the output of thirty or so blackwater systems, one for each shittery in this once-hotel that's occupied. Seventy rooms, not counting the ballroom and the lobby and the laundry and the kitchens and the basement, and abseil and proseil cables running the length of the elevator shafts. First Order and New Republic officials alike used to meet here to make deals, perform their intricate rituals of bobbing and puffing and credit-swapping here, hold their luxuriously illicit encounters in an increasingly bleak and depleted landscape. Now it's home to people the war skipped over: plenty of space for everyone who's left.

Finn lives on the third floor so that he can climb the stairs without too much trouble. Poe lives on the eighteenth floor so he can use the elevator shaft gadgetry, which he claims melodramatically is his only source of excitement. At the end of each day, they join each other in one or the other of their rooms—Poe's bed is a little bit better so that's where they usually end up—for the evening and sometimes, often, the night.

Finn designed and helped to install the blackwater systems, the network of dewcatchers and suncatchers that adorns the roof and clings like the web of a giant thu-spider to the walls on the building's two sunny sides. In the daytime, he does construction and demolition work. He chose it because it lets him use his body, his full effort, with forethought and concrete purpose. On the good days it feels like he's part of accomplishing something real, houses for people to live in, a flowing river instead of a stagnant lake above and a drought below. On the bad days it feels like busywork, ripping down one thing just to build another, no change, no gain, no enemy, no victory.

Today was neither good nor bad: just a day, which can be the most unsettling of all. But the hot water soothes out the aches, and the moss is antifungal as well as pleasant-smelling, and the lamplight is warm, and the company couldn't be improved upon. Some evenings, Poe is excited and talkative, has been saving up things to say to Finn all day, has had a breakthrough adapting a set of controls for someone with only one working limb or coaxed a little more efficiency out of the shape of a speeder. Some evenings, Finn walks him backwards toward the bed as soon as the door swings open.

Some evenings, they part angry, or with one of them angry, or don't see each other at all because one of them was angry in the morning, and sometimes the anger is fair and sometimes it's not. Sometimes Finn feels so blank or Poe so scattered that reaching toward the other feels like too much work, an ordinary effort transposed to extraordinary gravity, instead of the most natural and right thing they've ever done. Usually, though, one arrives at twilight to remind the other: you're here, I am here.

Finn doesn't know how Poe feels about it, swinging down the cables in the dark, but for him, that walk up the stairs is the walk back to himself, and he appreciates that it takes a little time and effort to get there, to make the distance and the crossing of it real in body and in time.

Tonight, Poe's quiet, sits on the floor a little distance away, watching Finn's face, letting his gaze rest. When the water cools, he'll set it aside—the antifungal compounds have to break down before he can use it to water the plants—while Finn dries his feet. Maybe one of them will have something he wants to say by then, besides, “Come to bed,” the night full velvet now outside, stars hidden by the fog that rolls up from the lowlands in this season, at this hour. Their silence tonight feels like _room_ , like a room where they decide what happens, where they can leave and enter as they please or as they must, where they choose each other each time.

 


End file.
